Mafia Princess (6 page)

I just had to get stuck into finding my English self. Up until then I’d talked and thought in Italian, but now I had to operate in a different language and culture, be a Lancashire lass. At that age I was like a sponge with all the new information. What made me work harder was wanting not to be different, wanting to fit in, to be a little girl like the other little girls, and not just to talk like the other girls but to
sound
like them; to belong.

Of course, all the kids were interested in me for the very fact I was different. They’d ask me to teach them swear
words in Italian and then parrot them around the playground. I could now swear in two languages. And fight. I was popular and I could hold my own. I had a couple of scraps at primary school but nothing too serious.

The most upsetting scrap was when someone I trusted, thought was a true friend, turned on me. I really didn’t know what hit me. My understanding was that nobody did that, it was against the rules. She was a big girl and said: ‘I’m the strongest of the class.’

Because she was my friend, I was soft. I asked: ‘How do you know that?’

She showed me by punching me. It was the last year of primary. The kids were running around the playground chanting: ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ Maybe she wanted to put on a show for them for she was mean. She bashed me. She hit me properly, really hard, knocked me to the ground and sat on my belly, then slapped me a couple of times. I was shocked that my friend could hurt me like that.

The next day I was doubled up in pain. She wasn’t
that
tough. It turned out I had to have my appendix out, but Mum always swore it was because of her attack.

Once when I was thirteen I caught a girl my age beating up an eleven-year-old girl against a wall. I grabbed the bully and got hold of her neck and pushed her up the wall and demanded, ‘How do you like this? If I ever catch you doing that again, I’ll do far more than put you up the wall.’ I couldn’t stand anything like that because I knew what it felt like.

As I got older, if someone was horrid to me I might be a bitch right back but I never went out of my way to be nasty for no reason or just for the sake of it. I was loud and a bit naughty at school but I didn’t get a lot of detentions because I seemed to get away with things. I could have done far better academically. I wasn’t lazy. I was just too busy with my life. Too busy with my make-up, getting my clothes right, being a teenage girl. I wasn’t thick but I wasn’t very academic. I was good at sports and represented the school in javelin and discus competitions, but I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. There were other things running around – boys.

Mum found work as a chambermaid; it didn’t pay well but with all the seafront hotels in Blackpool there were plenty of hours on offer. Within a year of returning we’d moved into our own rented place in Poulton-le-Fylde, and although we didn’t have a lot we had our own life. Yet I still dreamed of life in Italy and wondered about my dad. Would he call? Would he visit? I missed him, I missed life in Milan.

So I couldn’t believe it when some of that life turned up on our doorstep in England. From nowhere Grandpa Rosario arrived to see us with Auntie Rita’s husband Uncle Lino in early 1980. Their visit wasn’t expected so it was even more exciting for me. I loved seeing Grandpa for he’d always been around, the next best thing to Dad. This was a treat and there was plenty of cash for it. Grandpa was a changed man. Gone was the usual country look and in its place he wore a sharp suit with designer accessories. Uncle Lino, who I was wary of, was his stylish twin.

Grandpa said he was taking me to see the Queen. And we did go to Buckingham Palace but he said she wasn’t home that day. We stayed in a smart West End hotel, all the bills paid in cash, and visited other tourist spots like the Tower of London. It was five-star all the way. Grandpa had a couple of people to see but most of his attention was on us. I asked Mum how we could afford all these things but she smiled and said not to fuss.

Before he left Grandpa gave Mum hundreds of pounds: ‘Go out and get yourself and Marisa some clothes.’

When I realised Grandpa was leaving I was devastated; I was longing to visit Italy and see my family. Mum saw it in my face: ‘Don’t worry. We’ll go back to visit everyone when the holidays come around. It won’t be long.’

She missed Nan and all her friends as well, but she made it clear our life was in England now. All Mum cared about was that I settled down safely and did well at school. All her attention, time and money were devoted to me. Hers wasn’t a money-rich lifestyle but she had me and was absolutely determined I would be well brought up, an English princess. She still made a point of speaking to me in Italian, because that was very much part of my life too. For all her hurt she didn’t want me to lose that link. It worked. When I speak Italian, I think Italian, and it’s exactly the same when I speak English. The idiom changes. I change. It’s far more complex than driving on the left or driving on the right. You’re not changing sides, you’re splitting a personality.

When we went down to the beach at weekends for a wander around, I would sometimes look out to the Irish Sea and imagine Dad sailing in, taking the long way as ever. I said as much to Mum but she just frowned and said, ‘Marisa, Daddy is busy.’

He was. He was on the run, a fugitive in America. In the months since we left Italy, the drug business in Milan had escalated and so had the battle for power and profit. My family was at the centre of it and deals were being conjured all the time.

Francesco Mafoda, one of the leaders of Kidnaps Inc, the man who had unsuccessfully tried to recruit Dad, had a lean, elegant style. He didn’t look like a thick-necked Iron Curtain hoodlum but that was always his approach. His organisation had realised drugs were more profitable and less risky a game than kidnapping, and that they didn’t provoke so many headlines. The Di Giovine family and especially Emilio Di Giovine were a huge obstacle to Mafoda’s mob creating one drug empire. The word around the city was that Mafoda had put out a contract on Dad, which Dad found really offensive. Not that Mafoda had tendered for his death. But he’d only put a small amount on his head. He boasted: ‘I’m worth a million at least!’

Yet he knew he couldn’t be protected 24/7 and some smacked-out junkie with a gun could take him out. And would for a lot less money. There were also the young mob guns who would take a chance as much for the prestige – making their name, their
cojones
– as the money. Whatever the bravado, his life was on the line.

And Mafoda pissed Dad off even more. He tried to negotiate, got cheeky. He said he’d stop the contract if the Di Giovines gave him a giant share of the action in Piazza Prealpi. And allowed him majority control of all drugs operations.

‘Kill the bastard,’ was Nan’s view when she and Dad talked about the threat from the Slav gangster. Nan had no second thoughts about how to resolve it. She wanted to protect the family business – but also her son.

She didn’t rush things. Like some wily spycatcher, she deliberated and weighed up what would resolve the problem and prompt more profit in the future. Certainly, arrangements had to be made to get Mafoda out of the way, to defuse or eliminate him. There was a lot on top of Dad, a great deal of pressure from the police and the Slavs. Mafoda was sneaking around, stirring things up between different groups. He created bad blood between Dad and a big gangster family from Puglia, the stiletto heel of Italy. The Puglia crew were dealing in huge amounts of drugs and Mafoda was telling them one thing and Dad another. The gang leaders both realised how dangerous the Slav was: not just to them but to their worldwide operations. Mafoda was a crazy guy, capable of doing anything, and mad enough to believe he was untouchable.

He did not consider Nan a threat, though. Nan? This matriarchal lady who looked like an ageing housewife? What threat was she? She didn’t want trouble, did she?

Nan got word to Mafoda spelling out something like that. The family didn’t want any bloodshed, there was enough
business to go round and Mafoda must consider himself a friend of the Di Giovine family for life. His friends were the Di Giovine’s friends, his enemies the Di Giovine’s enemies. It was the beginning of a beautiful partnership.

It was classic
malavita
-speak yet Mafoda didn’t see it, his vision tinted by his arrogance. He regarded his play as a triumph, a result. He had what he wanted without fear of reprisals from the family or the police if he hit Dad. He should celebrate. He
would
celebrate. What about the bar on the far corner of the Piazza, headquarters of the empire he would be involved in running? Ennobled by his self-belief and a celebratory bottle of red wine, Mafoda wandered towards the Piazza Prealpi.

Nan wanted Dad out of the way before anything terminal happened, to get to America and boost the ‘Di Giovine Connection’ in New York where there were many family friends. Dad was keen to get there for altogether different reasons. There was business and there was Fanny, a statuesque Moroccan–Italian who provided him with exotic evening entertainments. He had broken off his affair with Effie, Miss Paraguay, but she was always tracking him down, telling him in her ladylike way that she was heartbroken and they must always be together.

Fanny was far more fun in every possible way. Gorgeous, she had the added attraction of liking money rather than questions. She was Dad’s perfect woman. But she’d taken off for New York and set herself up in a Manhattan apartment. Dad was missing her tricks.

Nan, who despaired of Dad’s love life and thought he was still under the spell of Miss Paraguay, had started her plan to get him to America a couple of weeks earlier. Connections. As long as I’ve known them, the family could always get paperwork, false documents for any purpose. At a price. There wasn’t anyone with influence, an official or an intermediary, a shopkeeper or a wine merchant, they hadn’t corrupted. It didn’t matter whether it was dodgy passports or prime Dolcelatte, they got the best.

A passport was created in the name of Nan’s brother Lorenzo Serraino. It was Dad’s face that looked out from the photograph page. An associate took it to Palermo in Sicily where it was ‘approved’ and a visa issued for America. Unlike most things in Palermo, that passport and visa were incorruptible, the real thing. Well, almost.

With the passport in Milan, his money belt loaded with dollars and Pan Am tickets booked for the night flight to New York, all Dad had to do on 12 June 1980 was get on the plane. He was delayed. He couldn’t find the new passport.

While others searched and finally found it he was hanging around at Nan’s. He’d walked across the square to visit and say goodbye to his brother Antonio, whose wife, Livia De Martino, was expecting a baby. He was outside their apartment when his minder Carlo – with all the threats, Dad was armed and wanted an extra pair of eyes constantly checking around him – saw Mafoda across the street. Mafoda’s red face seemed even brighter against his beige, rather rumpled linen suit.

‘Oh,
compadre
!’ Carlo shouted loudly to the Slav so Dad would look out and see who it was.

Mafoda always carried a gun, always, always had one on him. When he turned around he pulled something out of his jacket and my dad whipped his pistol from its holster and shot him. Across the road from Nan’s house, he killed him with a single bullet.

That’s when they found it was a bunch of car keys Mafoda had pulled from his pocket. He was armed, he had a gun. But he’d pulled out the key chain.

Not a gun.

Dad didn’t like what happened but at the same time he knew Mafoda was a very dangerous guy who wasn’t all there. Anything could have gone down. He thought Mafoda was drawing his pistol to assassinate him. The cops do it all the time – shooting people who aren’t carrying guns or bombs but who they think are. It wasn’t much different for my dad. I know that this guy had tooled himself up and gone to the area to kill my dad. My dad knew and he was ready.

Dad and Carlo didn’t have time to analyse what had happened. Dad had to make that flight. They whisked him away. He grabbed his travel stuff from Nan’s – no time for more farewells – and was in the car with Carlo putting his foot hard to the pedal and heading to Malpensa Airport.

And Dad’s flight on to New York.

Where the most powerful Mafia family in America were going to help him start an astonishing, if dangerous, new life.

‘When it’s three o’clock in New York it’s still 1938 in London.’

BETTE MIDLER

Mum knew Dad was on the run but, like the police and Interpol, thought he was hiding out in Morocco or Portugal. He’d always escaped into Europe or North Africa in the past. She thought he’d just appear, as he always had, and dismissed my questions about him coming to see me with the usual: ‘He’s busy, Marisa, don’t worry about him.’

It wasn’t just me who was thinking about Dad. After Mafoda’s death the international alarm bells were ringing for him. He’d vanished, like Lupin, as if by magic. Other than Nan and Grandpa and a couple of his brothers, no one knew where Dad was. The cops had issued a warrant for his arrest on murder charges. Yes, he’d pulled the trigger, but it hadn’t gone down the way they were telling it. He needed to become a new man to keep his freedom and take control of the American arm of the spiralling family drug empire.

When he arrived at JFK Airport the first thing he thought of was a safe haven and exotic home comforts. He phoned Fanny and she was glad to hear his voice. She also had a surprise – she was pregnant by him. He was delighted with the news. An instant family was wonderful cover for the soon-to-be-ennobled man on the run. Dad was about to live out the
later chapters of
The Count of Monte Cristo.
And they would be equally exciting, involving murder, kidnapping and death, greed, corruption and the politics of powerful families.

He placed his passport in a bank safety deposit box, temporarily burying Lorenzo Serraino. When he emerged from CitiBank on 2nd Avenue, he hailed a taxi as Count Marco Carraciolo, an Italian émigré, a glamorous aristocrat. He then arranged for Count Marco to have his own, personalised face. The Park Avenue plastic surgeon who worked on and around Dad’s eyes and cheekbones changed his appearance to the casual glance but not for too much scrutiny. But $20,000 paid for enough work that he’d never be recognised from the old wanted posters circulated by the Italian cops through Interpol. Count Marco appeared brighter-faced, a little fresher than Emilio Di Giovine, with a couple of years trimmed from his age.

But he was not the front of Dad’s Manhattan restaurant, Palio, on 57th and 2nd Avenue. It was licensed to Fanny’s brother Emo but Dad bankrolled the popular eating establishment he named after the Palio of Siena bareback horse races. He had an uncanny ability in the hospitality trade and was as successful as a Manhattan restaurateur as he had been as a hotelier in England. The huge difference was that in Manhattan it was the Mob and not Fortnum & Mason who were his main suppliers.

New York knew Dad as Count Marco but he was respected for himself by the Gambino family, who were still enjoying the legacy of the man who had been the most
powerful don in the United States. Carlo Gambino, the ‘boss of bosses’ of the American Mafia, had died from a heart attack four years earlier in 1976. The author Mario Puzo modelled his ‘Godfather’ on Gambino, whose mild-mannered, often decrepit appearance was deceiving and generally deadly. He never raised his voice but his soft-spoken words were Mafia law in America.

His son, Joey Gambino, was a superb connection for my family. He and Grandpa Rosario had used the same Puerto Rican crews in drug-trafficking operations. Joey leaned more towards the business than the brutality side of the Gambino rackets.

The rising star of the Gambino organisation was John Gotti, the ‘Dapper Don’, who favoured handmade suits and fine wine, and threatened anyone he suspected of disloyalty: ‘I’ll blow your house up.’ He was old-style Mafia, quite prepared to ‘take off the velvet glove’ at what he believed were important corporate moments. That was another connection with Dad. They’d both had to carve out their prestige within their mobs.

In 1979 Gotti had been made a
capo
in return for ‘good works’ – basically, the execution of rival gangster James McBratney who, with a group of other mobsters, had kidnapped and murdered the Don’s nephew Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Gambino. McBratney was the only one to escape the cops, and the Don ordered him dead. He was shot three times at point-blank range in Snoope’s Bar & Grill on Staten Island on 22 May 1973. Gotti was convicted of the killing but
when he got out of Green Haven maximum security in Storm-ville, New York, he was rewarded with promotion.

Dad was friendly with Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce and would also eat out with the main man, the
caporegime,
Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, to whom he became close. He looked up to him for his organisational abilities, and Castellano returned that respect to Dad. He’d see them and Gotti at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Gotti ran a meat supply company and also controlled food warehouses. He and Dad became partners in crime and cuisine: Palio was supplied by Mob shops and butchers at a special price.

There was much behind-the-scenes Gambino politics going on but, as Dad saw it, that was not his concern at the time. He liked their attitude: business was business. Personalities only played a part if they got in the way of business. When Dad arrived in the long, hot summer of 1980 the
Mafiosi
influence was overwhelming and touched almost every business, from high fashion to Wall Street, gambling and the movies, from hotels to the docks. It was all about investment: steal the money any way you can, clean it up, launder it, and bank it where the interest was high and the tax consequences zero. I don’t know how they did it but it was sometimes less than zero – they got a ‘bonus’ just for being the bank’s customers.

The old favourites included car-thieving rings, construction and the garment industries, but at the start of the 1980s there was no question from anyone that the huge money then and in the future was in drugs. The legit operations
were a veneer over where they were making their real money. Like all tiers of the Gambino Family, Gotti had his placement in the New York Police Department. The NYPD acted as an early warning system about any interest shown from Europe in the fugitive Emilio Di Giovine, which gave Dad lots of room and he took full advantage of his freedom to operate. It was the start of the 1980s, the consumerism heyday decade, and the Mob’s drug trade thinking mirrored Wall Street’s motto: ‘Greed is Good’.

Whatever they wanted, my family has always gone to the source. Initially they dealt with the middlemen, but they always stepped over them. Those guys couldn’t do much about it. They weren’t earning money, so it was tough. It was dog eat dog. But that’s how it was.

Huge consignments of heroin and cocaine were coming into Milan from Morocco as well as Turkey. The Turkish connection set up by Dad was lavish: our family used to steal cars, set them up with false documents as ‘ringers’ and send them back to Istanbul as part-payment. The Turks’ love of high-powered vehicles heightened our profit margin. Simultaneously, the Moroccans were sending as many if not more kilos again as the Turks. The deal was so good there was a traffic snarl-up when Italian dealers became overwhelmed by the supply.

It worked for the family: America was screaming for the stuff and the market there commanded much better prices, sometimes double the European tariff. Nan as
capa
– the Lady Boss – and Grandpa and the family organised the
cutting and shipping of the drugs. Operational HQ was, as always, Piazza Prealpi. Count Marco was the distribution kingpin in New York.

The smuggling operation had an elaborate beginning at the Piazza Prealpi. There and in surrounding garages, cello-phane-wrapped individual kilos of heroin would be subdivided into packets of double-sided tape and plastic, which would fit in empty bottles of shampoo, hair conditioner and body lotion – the kind of toiletries you’d find in an airline passenger’s luggage. The pack was Sellotaped to the inside of the container and the shampoo or conditioner or body lotion would be poured back in. They used any beauty products. A woman would carry five or six at a time. It was very straightforward. And successful. And kept in the family, for at the start the budget was tight. Relatives would get no money but a free flight to America carrying maybe £100,000 worth of drugs in their bags. That value was before Dad got it, cut it and, driving up the price to benefit from the demand, sold it to suppliers across the United States.

There were scores of ‘drug tourists’. They were almost always women, mums with babies, grandmas off to visit family and single girls off to America to find or make their fortune. What they all shared, along with their prepared stories, was their extra-strong perfume to confuse drug-sniffing dogs at customs. Often they’d wear body belts that were custom-made to take half-kilo and three-quarter-kilo bags of heroin on the way out and packs of US dollars on the way back. The smack was inside the thinnest of plastic film. The
belt was made out of cloth to absorb body sweat so it wouldn’t slip down at a wrong moment. No one wanted a belt stuffed with heroin around their ankles at American customs. One courier was very unlucky. By the time she landed in Italy, her flesh and the money belt tape’s superglue had somehow melted together. Her body, her flesh was stuck to the cash. Olive oil and lotions did no good. She was flayed alive under a scalding shower to separate her from the money. For the
Mafiosi,
it was needs must.

Dad was running America, Nan was controlling Italy and Uncle Antonio was in charge of the Spanish Connection. But it was in New York where everything was absolutely dandy, with such an ever-upward-moving market and the Gambino family protection. An incredible amount of cash was being generated. So much money Nan was running out of places to stash it. She had heroin in her neighbours’ washing powder packets and cash in their bedroom drawers. She had ‘mules’ moving money as well as drugs, and accounts were being opened around the world. Yet Nan remained Nan, cooking lunch and shouting at the ones she loved.

Mum and I saw the incredible change in the family’s circumstances on our annual visits every August: they were living like millionaires. We were the poor English relations. Flights to Italy were expensive so we had to go by train, down to London, on to Calais and beyond to Italy. We’d go overnight. We couldn’t afford a sleeper. We sat in the carriage – one of those four-each-side, facing-each-other jobs – with everyone else. You could get out into the corridor for
a stretch. It was a long night. In Milan we’d meet up with everyone and after a couple of days take off for Calabria and visit the usual suspects – of whom there were more than ever. Everyone seemed to be involved.

Nan now owned most of the village of San Sperato, and Mum and I stayed in a two-storey house she had there. Her brothers still looked after the family-owned farmland but were also dealing with the heroin shipments arriving from Morocco by container ship into the port of Gioia Tauro.

San Sperato was Nan’s summer headquarters. Her deckchair was in the same place every day, higher than the rest by the edge of the sand, and she sat there in a modest black swimsuit, wrapping a sarong round her legs whenever she stood up. She was under a parasol to shade her from the hot sun while we tried to cool off in the 40-degree heat by splashing about in the sea. People walking on the beach would stop by Nan’s chair, stoop down and kiss her hand. Wherever she went in Reggio Calabria – the market, the shops, the doctor’s – she was received with enormous respect. Doors were constantly opened, hands were always shaken and hats tipped.

There was a daily restaurant reservation for thirty of us for lunch on the beach, and the lobster and wine were waiting to nibble and sip as the orders were taken. I wondered where Dad was, but if I asked the answer was always: ‘Your papa is taking care of business.’

I felt as though I was in limbo. What was I? Italian? English? I didn’t really understand who I was, never mind what to think. But I knew in Italy that I was different.

A few of my English friends knew that my family was a bit dodgy but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I didn’t say: ‘My family will cut your legs off if you don’t…’ I never threatened people like that.

But my life was chalk and cheese. And Dad remained a phantom figure. When he did call in October 1980, over a year since I’d last heard from him, it was with a shock. Fanny had given birth to their daughter. I had a half-sister, Anna Marie. He gently told me how much he loved me and said he would call me in another couple of days

When he called next, nearly a year later, it was to tell me I had a half-brother, Emilio. Because he was known as Count Marco, Dad made out in the paperwork that Fanny’s kids were my grandpa’s children so they could have the Di Giovine name. Just like me.

He told me he thought of me every day and said, ‘I promise I will see you as soon as I can.’

Understandably, Mum would fly into a rage after the phone calls. I was upset. I didn’t even know where he was calling from and she’d quell her own fears by expressing them.

‘You don’t need to see him. Forget about him. He’s upsetting you and he’s not even here! He’s not part of
our
life. Don’t let him inside your head.’

Of course, Dad was well and truly there, superglued in. I so wanted to see him and be with him. Yet my body was sending my thoughts in all sorts of directions. In February 1983 a new and welcome complication came into my life when I found my first love, my puppy love. A lovely lad.
Michael Mason looked right out of Duran Duran. He was gorgeous. He was John Taylor’s double, tall and a couple of years older than me. I really loved him. His sister was only five years old and we used to babysit for her together, so I got to know his family.

He’d been going out with one of my friends but he finished with her. I went to the amusement arcade his dad owned in Thornton-Cleveleys in Lancashire and he was there and asked me out. I knew my friend was still madly in love with him, so I decided I couldn’t accept. It wouldn’t be fair. I went to her and told her what had happened, because I knew she’d be hurt if she found out from someone else, but I assured her I wouldn’t go out with him even though I liked him a lot.

She reacted with fury, insisting, ‘You’re not going out with him,’ even though I’d told her I wouldn’t, and calling me names. She was a big girl, quite forceful, and she’d just got done for grievous bodily harm. You wouldn’t mess with her. But I was cross because I’d been honest with her and she still kicked off, so I thought, ‘I’m not having that. I’m not having her tell me what to do.’